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* Want to tell me again the one about Doug Ducey's "floundering" campaign?

A few months ago, that was the chatter among political railbirds. It didn't make sense at the time. Ducey had only run statewide once, for the low-visibility office of state treasurer. He started the campaign largely unknown to voters.

At that point, Ducey wasn't really the frontrunner, but he was perceived as such because he had raised the most money and had built the broadest coalition. The early issues – Medicaid expansion, Common Core and SB 1062 – made Ducey look awkward, since they pitted elements of his coalition against each other. Hence, the false conclusion that his campaign was floundering.

However, his coalition, despite the stresses, didn't fracture. The question was whether, when voter contact activity truly began, the Ducey campaign could transform his advantages into votes. Clearly, it did. In fact, it was, tactically, one of the more impressive primary election efforts I've seen.

* There were, in my view, three key moments in the campaign from Ducey's perspective. The first was when the influx of Central American children made immigration, temporarily as it turned out, the only issue in the campaign.

Christine Jones had invested heavily in the issue from the beginning. She was poised to potentially ride it to victory.

Ducey was able to neutralize the issue, primarily through an ad starring Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. I hate to say it, because I regard Arpaio as a maleficent force in Arizona politics, but he kept Ducey from being eclipsed by the immigration issue.

* The second was the Ducey campaign's response to the million-dollar-plus attack ads on his tenure as head of Cold Stone Creamery funded by Jones' former boss, Go-Daddy founder Bob Parsons.

The blitzkrieg staggered the Ducey campaign. The conventional political wisdom is not to respond to attacks, but to counterattack on some other subject. Instead, the Ducey campaign doubled-down, coming out with another Cold Stone Creamery ad, highlighting its success and the awards Ducey received while running it.

That completely neutralized the Parsons attack. Irrespective of the specifics, the overall message of the Parsons critique was that Cold Stone Creamery had been a business failure. But voters knew where there was a Cold Stone Creamery store around the corner where they could buy ice cream. How big of a failure could it be? The Ducey campaign doubling-down with another round of Cold Stone Creamery ads reminded voters of that.

* Third, when Gov. Jan Brewer endorsed Scott Smith, the Ducey campaign instantly flooded the political space with reminders of his broad range of endorsements. That left Smith looking like Brewer's errand boy -- an image reinforced when he spent most of the remainder of the campaign following her around the state participating in her slate events, just one of the supporting acts while she was clearly the headliner.

* Smith was relegated to that role by the biggest strategic mistake of the campaign: getting in too late. Smith didn't resign as mayor of Mesa until April.

That wasn't too late to compete for voters. But it left way too little time to develop the campaign infrastructure and raise the funds necessary to reach them. The race became much more expensive than anticipated, accentuating Smith's problem of being outgunned.

Smith didn't have the resources to fully develop his campaign pitch, which would have included a critique of the status quo that could have resonated. His natural, and most powerful, appeal was as a change agent. But without money, he was stuck being overly dependent on Brewer's support -- and she's the Queen Bee of the status quo.

If Smith had begun campaigning for governor in earnest a year ago, this could have been a very different race.

* Ken Bennett was the most qualified candidate and ran the most substantive campaign. The Bennett tragedy is that he largely wasted, politically, the five and a half years he was secretary of state, when he could have made himself the presumptive nominee.

That left him stuck running publicly financed. And in a race in which $5 million and more was being spent for and against Ducey and Jones, that wasn't enough to get noticed.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RJRobb.